Soft skills are critical for success but what are they? Donna Price explores soft skills and how to bring them into the English language classroom.
Soft skills (also called people skills, transferable skills, and employability skills), are general skills that are necessary for success in the labor market at all employment levels and in all sectors. The SCANS (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) report in the 1990s provided competencies and foundation skills necessary to be successful in the workplace in the 20th Century. In the early 2000s, the Framework for the 21st Century revisited many of the SCANS competencies and foundation skills and again emphasized the importance of integrating workplace skills in education.
There is renewed interest in integrating workplace readiness skills in education as shown in the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) for Adult Education.
Employers report on the gap in soft skills among applicants. In 2013, a report from the Seattle Jobs Initiative in Perspectives from Employers and Community Colleges found that soft skills “were at least as critical as technical skills to entry-level employment.” 75% of businesses surveyed reported that soft skills were as important or more important than technical skills in securing entry-level employment. The 2013 Job Outlook Report, published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) stated that what made an ideal job candidate was the evidence of the ‘soft skills’ needed in the workplace. “In terms of the skills that differentiate candidates, employers say they want good communicators who can make decisions and solve problems while working effectively as part of a team.”
What are some of these soft skills employers refer to? In Are They Really Ready to Work? employers give their perspectives on the basic knowledge and applied skills of new entrants to the 21st Century U.S. workforce. In this report, a consortium (four corporations) asked over 400 employers across the U.S., “What skills are necessary for success in the workplace of the 21st Century?” The essential soft skills cited by these employers are ones that are echoed by employers across the U.S: teamwork, cooperation and collaboration, oral and written communication, problem solving and critical thinking and professionalism/work ethic. What can we do in our classes to integrate some of these essential soft skills? Below are five ways to integrate the soft skills in our classes that employers are telling us employees should have to be successful and thrive on the job.
Professionalism/work ethic
These include timeliness, dress, courtesy, teamwork, commitment, responsibility and integrity. One way to integrate responsibility is to provide students with checklists and weekly tests so that they can monitor their own progress. The Ventures series provides Self-Assessment checklists at the end of every unit. When students are given an opportunity to keep track of their progress, they are more motivated and committed to coming to class. They are responsible for keeping track of their progress. Conclude every lesson by calling attention to the relevance of the lesson and the classroom activities to students’ lives.
Students will come back to class if they see that what they are learning will help them achieve their goals. At the end of class for even two to three minutes, focus students’ attention on what they have learned that day and how what they learned will transfer to their lives. One way to get students to realize that what they are doing in school has some relationship to work is by using the poster “What did you do in class today?” If the instructor goes through the chart a few times a week, students begin to internalize the ideas on the poster. A few very common questions asked at a job interviews are, “Why should we hire you instead of someone else? What are your strengths? What do you do in your English class?” The ability for students to verbalize with examples that they work in teams, teach someone something or participate in class are some of the applied soft skills employers are looking for.
Oral communication
Give students the opportunity to communicate orally. This is one of the soft skills that is most commonly cited by employers. Even at the beginning level, students can practice communicating orally. In Ventures Basic, p. 65, students talk to different classmates to acquire information in order to fill out a chart. In Ventures 4, p. 65, students work together to practice the new vocabulary from the unit. In the Online Teachers’ Resource Room, there are communicative activities for all lessons in all levels of the Ventures series. One fun way to practice oral communication is with conversation cards. Students are given conversation cards and they mingle with each other to get answers from their classmates. Students are encouraged not to show their cards to their classmates, which forces them to listen to each other rather than read. A courteous way to end the short conversations is to have students use phrases for leave taking, such as, “It was nice talking to you. Thank you for your time. Let’s talk more later.”
Written communication
Students should be given opportunities to write in different genres, such as e-mails (Ventures Book 4, p. 67), letters (Basic p. 105), paragraphs (Book 4, p. 93) and summaries (Transitions, p. 31). Encourage peer revision whenever possible in writing. Useful phrases for giving advice or suggestions in writing could be taught. These include, “I think you should…(put this verb in the past). Why don’t you…(put a comma here). If I were you, I’d…(start a new paragraph here).”
Critical thinking
According to Parrish and Johnson’s Promoting Learner Transitions to Postsecondary Education and Work: Developing Academic Readiness Skills from the Beginning, critical thinking includes the following skills: organizing, categorizing, predicting, interpreting, analyzing and evaluating, summarizing and decision making. What can we do in our classes to promote critical thinking without changing what we teach? One way we can do this is the way we manage our classrooms. For example, have students come to class every day with an organized binder. In my experience, it’s not enough to ask students to bring a binder with dividers. They need to learn to make categories, to insert the handout in the correct category and to maintain the binder. If a student is asked at a job interview, “Why should I hire you? What can you offer us that the other 40 applicants can’t?” Our students will be ready for the answer: “I’m organized. I’m efficient. I can find what I need quickly.” Teachers can model organizational skills by starting each class with an agenda on the board. Writing a simple agenda or schedule of what is going to be done in class is a simple thing that has very positive results. To write an agenda, the teacher must be organized, with goals and outcomes in mind. Students see as soon as they walk in that their teacher has a plan.
They see what they are going to learn that day. If the teacher can’t get through the whole agenda because there isn’t enough time, the class can talk about what took longer than expected and why. If there is a certain amount of time left, students can negotiate what should be covered and what should postponed for the following day. Writing an agenda is one way to give learners more control over how a classroom functions because they are asked to make decisions, negotiate and allocate time…competences that transfer outside of the classroom. In all the Ventures Student books, there are Unit Goals on the second page of every unit. In addition, after each lesson, there is a check box that tells what the student has learned. These can be used as a type of agenda, where students see what they have completed that day.
Problem solving
In all the Ventures Student Books, the first page of every unit is a big picture, usually with an issue or problem students can discuss. Students can write the problem, discuss solutions and consequences and then negotiate and make a group decision on the best solution. For example, in Ventures Book 4, p. 96, students could use this template to talk about Yolanda’s problem. The template keeps students on task. Teachers could have a “Problem Box” where students could write (anonymously) about a problem they are having at school or at work.
The teacher could read the problem out loud, put students in groups with the template, and the class could help the student solve the problem. The technical (hard) skills students learn are “continually evolving.” However, the essential soft skills students need “remain constant. Regardless of their career path, they must learn to be good communicators, effective team players and creative problem solvers. They need to know how to lead, bounce back when things go wrong and be accountable and dependable employees. These timeless interpersonal and self-management skills will help them flourish and grow at work.” Let’s give our students an advantage over the competition by providing opportunities in our classes to develop their soft skills. Let us know what you are doing in your class to integrate soft skills.